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Joni Mitchell Remembers The Time She Never Got To Woodstock

Ticket sales for this weekend's Day in the Garden festival, the three-day commemoration of the 1969 Woodstock festival being held in Bethel, New York, don't appear to be coming up roses.

Originally set at $69.98 for the weekend, ticket prices have been slashed to $35 for the Friday and Saturday shows, and $25 for the alterna-laden Sunday concert. Don Henley and Stevie Nicks headline Friday, Joni Mitchell and Pete Townshend share the honors Saturday, while the Goo Goo Dolls and Third Eye Blind are set for Sunday.

For Joni Mitchell, the singer-songwriter perhaps most influential on the "Lilith" generation of female artists, the concert will mark the first time she has ever performed in the place she immortalized three decades ago in her classic paean to the show, "Woodstock," which she wrote even though she never made it to the festival.

Her friends in Crosby, Stills & Nash, who scored a hit with their version of Mitchell's "Woodstock", did get out to Yasgur's Farm, and told her about it upon their return.

"They showed up raving about it," Mitchell told MTV News, "which was really like salt in the wound. When I see the clips [from 'Woodstock'], I can almost see myself [crying] -- on camera and all that. Cause to be young then and to have missed that, even though it was that close, that was everything to me."

"But I guess it was meant for a reason," she continued, "and because I couldn't go, [Woodstock] dominated my mind. I watched everything on TV, I just sat in front of the TV and wrote most of the song in the first few days of the festival, and it was done by Sunday night."

According to a report in "Performance" magazine, Mitchell and Nicks will each take home $450,000 for their work, while Henley and Townshend are each fetching $550,000.